Stein on Writing (31 page)

Two authors whose books I edited, Gordon Thomas and Max Morgan-Witts, collaborated on a number of nonfiction “disaster” books that were hugely successful. They specialized in moment-by-moment reconstructions of cataclysmic events in such books as
The Day the World Ended, The San Francisco Earthquake, Shipwreck,
and
Voyage of the Damned. Voyage
was the story of the luxury liner
St. Louis,
one of the last ships to leave Nazi Germany before World War II erupted. We know at the outset that the 937 passengers, all Jews fleeing Nazi Germany, are in danger. If Cuba does not let them in, the ship will return its human cargo to the Nazis and many will die. The first chapter is headed
Wednesday, May 3, 1939.
That prewar date in itself is enough to put tension to work. The second chapter is headed
Thursday, May 4, 1939.
The tension increases. Therefore, each time a date appears, the reader’s pulse quickens. That’s tension at work.

Let’s examine how tension can be induced in a simple sequence. Here’s the way it was originally written:

The suspect refused to obey the policeman’s order to come out of his automobile.

No tension. Now the same event as edited:

The policeman ordered the suspect to come out of his automobile. The suspect didn’t move.

What creates the tension is separating the two parts of the action. The separation in the example is momentary. The continuation of tension over paragraphs and pages comes from stretching out a tense situation, often a confrontation between persons or groups. Let’s look at the cop and the suspect again:

The policeman ordered the suspect to come out of his automobile. The suspect didn’t move.

Bystanders reported that the officer then drew his gun and in a loud voice said, “Get out, now!”

The suspect shook his head and stayed put.

You can see how stretching out a sequence of acts produces tension that the reader finds pleasurable. Short sentences and short paragraphs help increase tension. A common error is the writer’s temptation to rush to a conclusion. In life we savor good experiences and long for them to continue. The rush to end a good experience is counterproductive. The writer must discipline himself to hold back.

Quoting What They Say

Di
alogue is an area in which the interests of fiction writers and nonfiction writers diverge. For the novelist, dialogue provides immediacy to a scene and is a major contributor to the experience of fiction. For the writer of articles and books as well as journalism, dialogue is a danger unless one uses direct quotes that sound real and can be substantiated. Those are two quite different matters.

Recording what people actually say does not read well. It is frequently hesitant, wordy, repetitive, and ultimately boring as court transcripts prove. The nonfiction writer has remedies.

If you quote anyone for more than three sentences, that’s a speech. Break it up with something visual. It needn’t be elaborate:

Craig Marshall was the first to speak. “The issues—count on it—are threefold,” he said. “In two sections of the village, tap water is the color of, call it mud. Been that way for thirty years and the incumbents have done nothing about it.” Marshall coughed against his closed fist.

“Item two,” he continued, “is the traffic nightmare from the sports complex. Anybody in this village has a heart attack when the traffic’s letting out can count on the ambulance getting to him in two or three hours.” He looked pointedly at the mayor. “That’s a death sentence for somebody because as far as I can tell the Almighty hasn’t given this community an exemption from heart attacks.”

The writer has broken up the quote with seemingly inconsequential things like a cough and looking at somebody. The first interruption humanizes the speaker and adds to the reality. The second—a glance at the mayor—invokes a suspicion of conflict by seeming to blame the mayor for the problems the speaker is talking about.

I saw the first draft, in which the speaker had two windy sentences that contributed absolutely nothing of importance and made the speaker sound like Dwight Eisenhower searching for the end of a sentence. The reporter left them out not to protect the reputation of Mr. Marshall but to prevent his copy from being boring. In reporting spoken words, it is not a writer’s obligation to reproduce all of the words as long as the speaker’s meaning is preserved.

Few people speak in complete and grammatical sentences. Moreover, perfectly formed sentences often come across to the reader as made up. In this instance, the reporter did a good job of catching the flavor of what was said. In quoting, the writer has to beware of cleaning up a speaker’s sentences.

In 1975, just thirty days before Jimmy Hoffa, icon of the Teamsters Union, disappeared from the face of the earth, he came to lunch, bringing along, at my suggestion, the man who was ghosting his autobiography. Hoffa’s material had been recorded on tape. The material as spoken by Hoffa was fascinating and colorful. That same material, with Hoffa’s rough language cleaned up and sentences straightened out, was unreal and boring. The purpose of the meeting was to insist that the writer restore Hoffa’s words, including the expletives and grammatical howlers. I wasn’t arguing for a verbatim transcript of the tapes but for a
retention of their color,
which I succeeded in getting, and which all writers who deal with the spoken words of others should strive for.

When you’re reporting the results of an interview, you will likely end up with too much quotation. You want to keep those parts that reveal the character of the speaker or that define subject matter. You want to preserve comments that are confrontational, colorful, or especially appropriate, and ditch the rest.

That brings us to the second matter. Never intentionally misquote. And never invent dialogue.

Invented dialogue is usually a highly visible sign of untrustworthy writing. A few writers of nonfiction commit the same errors as some historical novelists. They provide dialogue that would have been impossible for anyone to record. I know of cases in which books were rejected by editors because some piece of attributed dialogue was so apparently contrived that it cast doubt on the reliability of the author for facts that could not easily be confirmed.

Don’t tempt rejection by an editor or a lawsuit from a person quoted inaccurately. If you find yourself inventing dialogue, write a play, novel, or movie.

Guts: The Decisive Ingredient

A
long time ago I took an oath never to write anything inoffensive.

In working with literally hundreds of authors over a period of many years I concluded that the single characteristic that most makes a difference in the success of an article or nonfiction book is the author’s courage in revealing normally unspoken things about himself or his society. It takes guts to be a writer. A writer’s job is to tell the truth in an interesting way. The truth is that adultery, theft, hypocrisy, envy, and boredom are all sins practiced everywhere that human nature thrives.

What people who are not writers say to each other in everyday conversation is the speakable. What makes writing at its best interesting is the writer’s willingness to broach the unspeakable, to say things that people don’t ordinarily say. In fact, the best writers, those whose originality shines, tend to be those who are most outspoken.

Do shy men and women ever become superb writers? Yes, after overcoming their natural reluctance to say the things they think. Fig leaves have no place on either the bodies or the minds of the best writers. I like the way Red Smith put it: “There’s nothing to writing. All you do is sit down at a typewriter and open a vein.”

On the issue of candor, is there something nonfiction writers can learn from novelists? Yes, there is hardly anything about the secret, sometimes mischievous, cruel, evil, outrageous, defiant, and glorious acts and thoughts of human beings that has not appeared in the novels of the last few decades. And there is little about the private acts of people that has escaped reporting—and not only in the sensational press. The novelist has it easier. He hides a little—just a little—under the presumption that he is making things up. We all know that the most truth-bearing parts of superior fiction aren’t “made up.” They come from the novelist’s obser
vation and understanding of human nature. The nonfiction writer who dares to dare is more exposed. The assumption of his readers is that he is writing fact. He may have to prove his assertions to an editor, or worse, to a court. He needs the courage of a soldier or firefighter because often the more he reveals that is interesting to his readers, the more exposed he is. Readers are curious about the inmost secrets of others. The subjects of factual writing—if they are not publicity seekers—don’t want anything embarrassing on public display. It is no accident that some of the best nonfiction writing of the century has come from writers who are also experienced novelists.

Mary McCarthy, whose novels brought her fame, early on earned a reputation for keen observation and a sharp tongue for her critical writings. George Orwell’s nonfiction is far superior to his fiction and exceptionally outspoken. Critics have called him the best nonfiction writer of this century. V. S. Naipaul’s nonfiction, once sampled, will lead you quickly to conclude that he has the courage to see and say what, for instance, politicians almost never say. His nonfiction makes waves by being sharply observant and truthful in territory that frightens off lesser writers. Rebecca West, whom
Time
magazine called “indisputably the world’s No. 1 woman writer,” started out as a novelist and six decades later was still writing fiction. However, her great reputation rests largely on her shrewd, brave, and intelligent factual writing. Most writers know Scott Fitzgerald’s
The Great Gatsby
but haven’t read his gutsy nonfiction in
The Crack-Up.

Writers read writers, and if being outspoken is a problem for you, I suggest you immerse yourself in the work of the writers I’ve mentioned, and also try the work of contemporaries like Gore Vidal and Joan Didion, even if it’s just to sample how they deal with candor.

Vidal, who has never wanted for vitriol much less candor, begins one piece about Tennessee Williams by passing the candor chalice to Williams, whom he quotes saying, “I particularly like New York on hot summer nights when all the ... uh, superfluous people are off the streets.” Borrowing the candor of another has been useful to Joan Didion also. I quote from
Goodbye to All That,
a memoir of her pilgrimage to New York when she was twenty-three:

I remember once, one cold bright December evening in New York, suggesting to a friend who complained of having been around too long that he come with me to a party where there could be, I assured him with the bright resourcefulness of twenty-three, “new faces.” He laughed literally until he choked, and I had to roll down the taxi window and hit him on the back. “New faces,” he said finally, “don’t tell me about
new faces
.”
It seemed that the last time he had gone to a party where he had been promised “new faces,” there had been fifteen people in the room, and he had already slept with five of the women and owed money to all but two of the men.

Next let’s sample someone not as well known. Gayle Pemberton, a black writer with a Ph.D. from Harvard, wrote about the time she was going broke in Los Angeles on a temporary typist’s revenue, and signed up to work for a caterer on three successive weekends. What she later wrote about it made the experience worthwhile:

Our caterer was one of a new breed of gourmet cooks who do all preparation and cooking at the client’s home—none of your cold-cut or warming-tray catering. As a result, her clients had a tendency to have loads of money and even more kitchen space.

Usually her staff was not expected to serve the meal, but on this occasion we did. I was directed to wear stockings and black shoes and I was given a blue-patterned apron dress, with frills here and there, to wear. Clearly, my academic lady-banker pumps were out of the question, so I invested in a pair of trendy black sneakers—which cost me five dollars less than what I earned the entire time I worked for the caterer. Buying the sneakers was plainly excessive but I told myself they were a necessary expense. I was not looking forward to wearing the little French serving-girl uniform, though. Everything about it and me were wrong, but I had signed on and it would have been unseemly and downright hostile to jump ship.

One thing I liked about the caterer was her insistence that her crew not be treated as servants—that is, we worked for her and took orders from her, not from the clients, who might find ordering us around an emboldening and socially one-upping experience. She also preferred to use crystal and china she rented, keeping her employees and herself safe from a client’s rage in case a family heirloom should get broken. But on this occasion, her client insisted that we use his Baccarat crystal. We were all made particularly nervous by his tone. It was the same tone I heard from a mucky-muck at my studio typing job: cold, arrogant, a matter-of-fact “you are shit” attitude that is well known to nurses and secretaries.

As Pemberton was drying one of the Baccarat glasses, it shattered in her hand, a happy accident in that she used it as the fulcrum of her piece.

Characteristic of another kind of nonfiction gutsiness is that of Seymour Krim, who wanted, as many writers do, to be a major novelist and instead made exemplary nonfiction his calling. “One life was never quite enough for what I had in mind,” he says and means it, as he lays his life bare. Listen to the individual sound of his voice:

You may sometimes think everyone lives in the crotch of the pleasure principle these days except you, but you have company, friend. I live under the same pressures you do. It is still your work or role that finally gives you your definition in our society, and the thousands upon thousands of people who I believe are like me are those who have never found the professional skin to fit the riot in their souls. Many never will. I think what I have to say here will speak for some of their secret life and for that other sad America you don’t hear too much about. This isn’t presumption so much as a voice of scars and stars talking. I’ve lived it and will probably go on living it until they take away my hotdog.

The voice picks up speed:

America was my carnival at an earlier age than most and I wanted to be everything in it that turned me on, like a youth bouncing around crazed on a boardwalk. I mean literally everything. I was as unanchored a kid as you can conceive of, an open fuse-box of blind yearning, and out of what I now assume was unimaginable loneliness and human hunger I greedily tried on the personalities of every type on the national scene as picked up through newspapers, magazines, movies, radio, and just nosing around.

It should be evident by now that forthrightness doesn’t involve sensationalism suitable for the exploitation tabloids. What it requires is honesty of a kind that gets self-suppressed by the public. Doctors are part of that public, but not doctors who are good writers. Witness Richard Selzer’s chapter, “The Knife,” in his book
Mortal Lessons: Notes on the Art of Surgery.
He does what no surgeon has done before, with precision, clarity, grace, imagination, and candor:

One holds the knife as one holds the bow of a cello or a tulip—by the stem. Not palmed nor gripped nor grasped, but lightly, with the
tips of the fingers. The knife is not for pressing. It is for drawing across the field of skin. Like a slender fish, it waits, at the ready, then, go! It darts, followed by a fine wake of red. The flesh parts, falling away to yellow globules of fat. Even now, after so many times, I still marvel at its power—cold, gleaming, silent. More, I am still struck with a kind of dread that it is I in whose hand the blade travels, that my hand is its vehicle, that yet again this terrible steel-bellied thing and I have conspired for a most unnatural purpose, the laying open of the body of a human being.

Are readers ready for this kind of candor? In 1994 another physician who writes well, Sherwin B. Nuland, published a book called
How We Die.
It was selected by a book club, became a bestseller, and won the National Book Award for nonfiction.

Did I have to search through my library to find the examples of frankness quoted in this chapter? They are all from one section of a single anthology I recommend to you,
The Art of the Personal Essay,
edited by Phillip Lopate. That book starts with the forerunners, Seneca and Plutarch, picks up Montaigne and Samuel Johnson and Hazlitt en route to the Americans of the present century, and that journey reveals an evolution toward the candor with which our writers tell us like it is.

The audience is ready. The question is “Are you?”